There are reasons why businesses are acting like the Grinch and stealing Christmas. The first and most obvious is cost. But companies might also be reluctant to splash out when the rest of the world doesn't feel like throwing a party.

Another good reason for the unwinding of Christmas is that companies are cutting staff everywhere. As a rule, companies usually lay off more people in the lead up to Christmas because they want to rule a line at the end of the year. But this year, it's going to be worse. Citigroup's plan to axe 53,000 jobs is only one example with forecasts that as many as 10,000 jobs could be cut from Australia's big banks in the next year. And that's just one sector.

Holding a party when the company has just sacked a bunch of people would leave those remaining wondering if the cost of the party came at the expense of someone's job. "If the company is laying off people, celebrating in some over-the-top way would be insane," John Challenger, chief executive officer at US outplacement specialists Challenger, Gray & Christmas told Workforce Management journal.

Still, office parties can be pretty awful at any time. And there is something about cutting loose at a party that seems out of step with the alienating culture sweeping through offices these days. It's a point taken up by the Gawker website.

"Office culture has sucked more than usual recently. Everyone's completely paranoid about layoffs, and all the big companies are cancelling Christmas parties. They were an important company-designated place for employees to act out, get loose, and maybe do something inappropriate--a poorly-chosen liaison will have the office bonding over gossip for months. But Christmas holiday parties are out of step with today's office culture, anyway--it seems that the modern office grows more and more alienating. More of us "talk" to people in close proximity to us all day by using a keyboard and screen. (Then you get home and wonder what to do with your evening, and why you're so tired.) We are alone together--surrounded by people, but people who are are sitting in front of screens wearing earbuds, listening to their separate musics, updating their personal social networks, and living in their separate bubbles."

Nevertheless, the Christmas party might go some way to building some goodwill and morale. Done properly, Christmas parties can result in improved communication, better morale and a sense of appreciation for hard work done through the year. And some have fun.

So what alternatives are there? How should companies respond if they're tight on cash?

Some suggestions include sending people cards or other messages of thanks, maybe even include a voucher offering 10% off their first purchase in the new year. Or alternatively, some might give people an extra day off. Or put on smaller celebrations for teams, or give people vouchers for dinner.

Low budget celebrations are probably better than nothing at all because they give people a chance to get together and connect, something that might be quite important in these times.

Has your workplace scrapped the Christmas party? Or are they planning to do something low key? What other things can companies do to bring people together at the end of the year, or boost morale?

We are now looking at the end of retirement. It's becoming a relic of another era, transformed by demographic, lifestyle and financial choices. Older people, the boomers, are going to continue working well into their old age, probably until they drop. It's happening right now.

But what impact is that going to have on the workforce? What challenges does that present for management and organisations. Not to mention younger people who want to move on in their careers and who now find they can't get promoted because there's a bunch of old workers holding on to those positions? The boomers, like rusty nails, are not that easy to remove.

Back in July I did a blog entry looking at the growing trend of "worktirement" where older workers were staying on the job, in one form or another, well beyond the standard retirement age of 65 and another trend of "encore careers" for workers in their 50s and 60s.

Peter Drucker, the management guru's guru who died four years ago at the age of 96, predicted this 10 years ago. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in the late 90s, Drucker said: "The dominant factor for business in the next 20 years - barring war, pestilence or collision with a comet - will not be economics or technology. It will be demographics. The key factors for business will not be the overpopulation of the world, which we have been warned about for 40 years. It will be the increasing underpopulation of the developed countries such as Japan, Europe and North America.''

But all that creates enormous issues for organisations, as discussed in this article here. "A mass of older workers past the traditional retirement age could create huge bottlenecks that jam up companies, making it much harder for firms to promote talented individuals and stopping younger workers get on the career ladder. Even worse, firms could find themselves having to manage a population of "ageing slackers", or older workers who are doing just the bare minimum to get a pay cheque without getting fired ... Then there is the worrying prospect of disgruntled older workers resorting to litigation or even work sabotage because of their lack of retirement savings."

Another force that makes the end of retirement is the skills shortage. Many companies simply can't afford to let go of older workers who have spent years building up irreplaceable expertise. It's an issue I look at in my piece here.

Part of the big change is simply the fact that people are living longer. Back in the days when retirement was conceived, you shuffled off at 65, played golf, bowls or travelled a bit and then died. Now with people living into their 90s, there are older people out there with potentially decades of productivity in them. Time Magazine has a good photo gallery of celebrities, all older than 65, who are continuing to make a difference, from Clint Eastwood to Dame Judi Dench to Archbishop Tutu.

Instead of retirement, we will see the development of the "boundary-less career". Contract workers, self-employed experts, the self-employed, part-timers and knowledge workers, all older than 65, are in the ascendancy. To say this presents new challenges for management is an understatement. For a start, many of these workers are not likely to be employees of the organisation. Secondly, it could see more jobs being redesigned to suit the needs of older workers, and an increase in job sharing, part-time and contract work, telecommuting and mentoring.

Expect to see some organisations redesigning themselves, setting up separate companies that will take on older workers contracting their skills back into the organisation.

Are you seeing this happening now? For the boomers out there, how many of you are planning to retire? Do you see retirement becoming a thing of the past? And what sort of issues and problems do you think this will create? And for the Xers and Gen Y people, how do you feel about it?

Here's a question out of left field. With the economy in cardiac arrest, and with companies everywhere laying off workers, is it a good time to start up a business?

Sure, it's risky. But there are going to be lots of people, many of them managers and executives with good payouts, looking for something to do. So what are the risks of starting up now? What does it take to get started?

When you think about it, any time is right to start a new venture, provided you have assessed and developed the opportunity and potential market. Bill Gates didn't wait for the recession of 1974-75 to pass when he founded Microsoft. Other companies that started in recessions include CNN, GE, Sports Illustrated and Hewlett Packard. You can check them out in this list here.

First, there are a number of issues starting up a business in this climate. The most obvious is funding. It's harder to raise a bank loan these days. You also have to deal with higher costs, weak consumer spending and the fact that the public is now generally more cautious. On the plus side, suppliers could cut you better deals, people might be willing to sign on for less and rents might be lower.

Writing in the US technology and venture capital journal The Industry Standard, columnist Melissa Chang lists five reasons why a recession is a good time to start a company : starting a company in a downturn forces you to be frugal, it forces you to take a close look at your idea and ask yourself hard questions like whether there is a market for this product if customers are cutting back, whether you have enough capital to get this off the ground without going out and raising more, and whether the product would be good for users in good and bad economic times. Also, you are more likely to get a committed team and it gives you a head start so that when the economy recovers, you'll be way ahead of your competitors.

And as Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman says, you can't sit around procrastinating and waiting for the right time to jump. "Waiting for the "perfect time" to make the jump is usually futile, for there's no moment that's truly perfect. So even if you're early in your corporate career, when a winning new-business idea comes along and sparks an entrepreneurial passion in you, carpe diem."

But that raises another question? What kind of person starts a business? Having worked for myself for some months now, I would say at the outset that you really need two things: fire in the belly and a very high threshold for anxiety that comes with uncertainty. If you can't handle anxiety, if you fall apart when things are unclear and are not working out, when people don't deliver on their promises, if you can't handle swimming with sharks, and if you're not particularly passionate about anything, stick to being an employee. It's a lot easier. And there is nothing wrong with that.

A recent study out of the US Small Business Administration found that the self-employed tend to have done less well academically. Even more interesting is the finding that they are less likely to have studied business or management. So business education is not producing entrepreneurs and people studying business tend to go for the security of a regular pay cheque. Entrepreneurs are also less likely to have studied engineering, maths, education or science.

Are you planning to make the jump? What are your plans? And for those who have cut the cord and broken out on their own, what advice would you give? What are the lessons you've learned?"

Kids represent an enormous market for companies, particularly in the lead-up to Christmas.

As Kiplinger deputy editor Janet Bodnar says, a lot of it comes from parents just providing the money. Potentially, that creates a strong market, not to mention plenty of room for manipulation. Not only from marketers but kids themselves. But is it ethical? How big a market is it, particularly given that people are having fewer kids and that we have an ageing population? Will it grow? What does that mean for family spending patterns and priorities?

US toy industry expert Richard Gottlieb is pretty up front about the ethics. In a blog entry this week, he said there is absolutely nothing wrong with targeting kids. "They, as we were when we were young, are part of a free enterprise, consumer culture that demands that they make a lifetime of good buying decisions. The best way to learn to navigate that culture is while we are young and the mistakes are small. As far as making it hard on families this season goes, believe me there are families with much bigger issues on their plates right now then worrying about whether their child will be unhappy because they did not get a particular toy. Delivering disappointment goes with the job of parenting. It's in the job description."

An interesting report from the Future Foundation, Marketing to kids has found that today's kids are a lot older than they were in the 1960s and that has transformed their priorities with more focus on items like clothes, technology and music. But is that because they are just living in a different era and exposed to different things, or is it because there are more pdoducts available? No-one knows for sure.

The report says: "Childhood in the 1960s was a clearly defined time that lasted noticeably longer than it does today where the boundaries
between the teenage years and childhood are more blurred. Indeed, nowadays children adopt
teenage attitudes far sooner, hence the term 'tween'. It is difficult to establish whether this accelerated speed of development stems from the sheer wealth of products targeting children at an earlier age and motivating them to feel and act older or whether it is simply that children are, under the weight of say post-Sixties attitudes, evolving faster. We would suggest that it can be explained by a combination of the two forces. Children are very receptive to products and to promotions that allow them to feel older than they are and to emulate the lives of adult celebrities and role models around them. In the United States, Teenage Research Unlimited interviewed a number of children about their perceptions of themselves and their aspirations and found that the average American 12 year old wishes that he or she were 17 and the average 17 year old wishes that he or she were 19. To fulfil these aspirations young people
have embraced a panoply of products such as make-up, toiletries, clothes, technology and music that are closely associated with a more adult life-stage. There will no doubt continue to be a market for these tweens who aspire so strongly to growing up fast."

The study also found that households are more democratic than they used to be and that kids are consulted more on household purchasing decisions. That said, there is still plenty of discipline, in fact, probably more so when it comes to things like what they eat, their clothes and how they spend their leisure time. Kids are also spending more time watching TV and social networking.

According to the report, this means brands will have to start creating a simultaneous appeal to parents and children.

Kids, particularly tweens, are on the cutting edge of digital communications, multitasking seamlessly between tasks. Which explains why some companies are starting to target them. Here's one example of a Facebook for tweens, And there'll be many more.

What's your take on the ethics of marketing to kids? How different are kids today? How different are they from when you were growing up? What are their priorities? What are companies now doing to reach them? How much do kids influence buying decisions in your household?

Backstabbing, mobbing and career sabotage are part of working life. Everyone at some stage of their working life has had to confront it.

What sort of things should people do when they have to deal with the career saboteur? And does the problem get worse when the economy is struggling?

The Wall Street Journal suggests that backstabbers are out in force when things are going badly. The reason is pretty simple: when times are tough, you have more people competing for work and doing whatever it takes to get ahead which provides some pretty solid conditions for back stabbing and undermining. The other point is that when people around you are losing their jobs, you get insecure and that is fertile ground for others to play on those feelings of uncertainty.

Backstabbers also thrive in places that are overtly political, that pit different people against each other, ready to cut each other up at the first sign of weakness and where there is a culture of paranoia that results in people making mistakes, or blaming others for stuff-ups and covering up. The Canadian journal MacLeans has a good take on the kind of atmosphere that engenders. It's right up there with evil bosses and supid rules.

This is also consistent with another study, reported here which finds that the problem has become worse over the last five years. Backstabbers can be lumped into certain categories, according to this report. There's the the pundit, who starts rumors or contributes to them; the lobbyist, who is always pushing his or her personal agenda; the covert operator who manipulates everyone around them to get ahead; and the adviser who is close to the boss and who acts as the eyes and ears for the boss.

So what sort of things should people watch out for? Tips from experts include watching out for rumours and if you hear anything about yourself, tracking down where it came from; watching out for what happens when something goes wrong and making sure you don't cop the blame; keeping an eye out for people who take credit for your actions and achievements; and watching out for disparaging remarks, including nicknames and other putdowns.

And how do you deal with it when it happens? First you have to recognise that politics is just part of organisational life. Denying that, specialists claim, is like saying water isn't wet. Politics, after all, is about power, and that makes management deeply political. That is what confronts anyone trying to make their way through an organisation or change it. And managers can be like politicians because their job involves process-driven tasks such as planning and budgeting, setting targets, organising, monitoring, staffing, establishing structures and dealing with problems. All of these are political because they reinforce or redistribute power in some way, as do policies around parental leave, family leave, child care, flexitime, casuals, outsourcing, telecommuting and encouraging big ideas.

At the end of last month, I did a blog entry looking at how much time people waste at work. But that's even more true for managers who have spent years working their guts out to get a promotion. But when they get there, they start asking themselves what was it all for? So much of their time seems to get wasted on papework.

Managers always tell me about the time they spend pushing around bits of paper, and attending meetings that seem to go nowhere. It seems to come with the territory.

This is a critical issue because it goes to the heart of one of the oldest management problems: how do you get your people to do more without actually paying them extra?
Particularly when they already feel they are doing the work of two or three people?

The study of 1276 mid-level managers in
12 countries around the world, including Australia, reveal that managers spend 34% of their time on
administrative tasks. Even more alarming is the finding that it's getting worse. Unproductive workforce time rose 2.2 points in 2007. Think about that. This means people are spending 1.7 days of every workweek on unproductive activities.

The amount of time spent on administrative duties is many times more than what is spent on active supervision (7%) and training of the workforce (3.1%).

Managers were also complaining that a lot of their direct reports are just a waste of time. Managers said they received, on average, 10 management reports each week. Then they were asked how many reports they needed to do their job. Two of three reports, or 66.34%, of those reports were unnecessary.

So why is this happening? OK, workplaces are not necessarily that productive. But why is it getting worse?

The managers cited a number of reasons why this was happening. The biggest complaint was a shortage of skilled workers. This was followed by a lack of good internal communication, red tape, rules and regulations, poor employee morale and high staff turnover. Another problem was the quality of their own supervisors, or rather, the lack of quality.

Interestingly, only two countries covered in this report posted reductions in unproductive workforce time - Australia and Britain. Australian workers were found to have the lowest level
of unproductive time (22.9%) and South African workers were the least productive.

Still, it's impossible for people in organisations to be 100% productive. Companies just don't work that way. But the Proudfoot study suggests that managers need to put more time into coaching and assistance. Or maybe managers just aren't trained properly so they come in unprepared.

If you are a manager, how much of your time gets chewed in unproductive activities? What's the worst and most time-consuming? Were you expecting it when you came in? And how much time do people waste at your workplace? What kind of things do people do that fritters time away?

Call it recession stress. There is no doubt that the cutbacks we are now seeing will affect stress levels all around. Which can lead to problems like unplanned absenteeism, reduction in work team cohesion and productivity, reduction in staff morale, management and employee time getting chewed up in investigations, mediation sessions and hearings, resignations, labour replacement costs and workplace accidents. Not to mention the stress and illness claims.

The International Monetary Fund says global recession is on the cards in 2009, reports MarketWatch.What's even more alarming, says the IMF, is that all the policy measures by Governments to try and kick start their economies are not working. Which means next year is going to be tough, very tough. Expect more cutbacks and layoffs. So how will that affect employee health?

At the extreme end, experts now predict that we will see more suicides because of the financial meltdown and already there is some anecdotal evidence supporting this

A recent study out of Finland, reported here, tells us that safe and predictable workplaces are actually good for the heart. The converse is that difficult work zones can send you to an early grave.

The study examined the link between job characteristics and heart disease among 7663 employees. They found the risk of heart disease was 1.8 times higher in so-called "disorganised settings". For that, read workplaces that are going through change and upheaval, where there is constant change and where employees feel they lack control.

What's interesting about this study is that the researchers seemed to separate workplace factors from other lifestyle issues that affect your health, like smoking and lack of exercise.

Another Finnish study, reported here found that downsizing can be a health hazard. In once city, they slashed their 1000-strong municipal workforce. As a result, the rate of medically certified absenteeism escalated.

In London, stress levels are running high with more people working longer hours or taking on a second job.

And celebrity chef Jamie Oliver warns that the economic downturn will lead to more people eating unhealthy food, hitting the takeaways and fast food outlets. Generally, the alcohol sector does pretty well when there is a slump. So expect an impact on health.

Even if Australia avoids a recession, we can expect more people will be under the pump next year with fewer people doing the job and companies cutting back their budgets.

The bottom line is this: people feel a lot more secure and healthier in stable environments. When that goes, their health starts to suffer. And that can feel like an assault on your sense of well-being.

Workplace coaches say there are several things you need to do to maintain your sense of wellbeing when stuff is hitting the fan.

The first step is to take care of yourself. It's a pretty obvious point to make but many stop exercising, start neglecting their diets or smoke and drink more. You should also try and surround yourself with positive people and avoid the kind of chatter that will get you down. Probably the most important point is to look outside the workplace for sources of support. Family and friends are crucial anchor points when you are going through upheaval. Remember, it's important to develop a healthy and thriving life outside the workplace. That's the sort of stuff that gives life meaning.

Have you seen the downturn affecting anyone's health. Has it affected yours? What are your tips for staying healthy during this crisis?

The lead up to Christmas is always a bad time for job lay-offs. What usually happens is that companies that are struggling and wanting to draw a line in the sand start sacking employees in the weeks leading up the festive season. And this year, it's going to be worse.

One of the terrible things about mass sackings is the impact it leaves on those who remain behind, the survivors. So how should companies deal with their employees during a downturn?

The first is to crank up the reward system for those remaining. Special efforts and hard work need recognition. So what happens when there isn't enough money for rewards? You get creative, either with give-aways, days off or special awards. Or if employees come in on a weekend, put on a catered lunch.

Another creative idea for linking rewards to effort is to find out new things about your employees, see what gets them fired up and what they enjoy, and then frame the recognition and reward around that.

Another good suggestion: don't be afraid to ask for help. And go out of your way to thank people when they do chip in.

Sizmore says that if you go away on a business trip, even if it's interstate, you should come back with something for everyone. It doesn't have to be expensive, it's just something to show that you have keep them in mind.

My US colleague Anita Campbell has come up with some good ideas at her Small Business Trends blog. Some are obvious but it's amazing how few businesses actually do it.

The first thing is to talk to employees, don't treat them like mushrooms. This is particularly important in small businesses where employees are much closer to the coal face and know what's going on in the business, particularly when they see fewer orders and fewer customers come in. Discussing finances with them might be a delicate issue but you have to find some sort of middle ground so that you won't have people jumping to wrong conclusions. And if you are planning, or even thinking about job cuts, it's probably better to level with people. They are adults, they can handle it and it allows them to start planning their future.

Campbell also suggests you should allow people to talk and ask questions. They have a right to know, if only because it allows them to look ahead. And just hearing their questions will give you some idea of what you're people are thinking. It might also give you the opportunity to hose down rumours.

Another important step might be to encourage people to come up with ideas and solutions. Because employees are at the front line, they will often have with ideas that management had never thought of. It also makes people feel less helpless.

Probably the most important thing though is to avoid double standards. There is nothing that gets people more riled up than seeing budgets getting cut while management is living it up in corporate boxes and long lunches. If you are cutting back on budgets, start with yourself.

Is your company doing anything like this? How should companies behave to their employees during a downturn? And what suggestions would you make?

Last week's election of Barack Obama signals a massive, and long overdue change. But what a mess he's inherited, one with enormous management challenges.

Obama has a massive to do list. He comes into office when the US is in the grip of its worst economic conditions since the 1930s, fast slipping into an official recession if it's not there already. Also, the US is caught in two hopeless wars with no end in sight. Obama also has to heal the divisions within US society, fix its apartheid-style health care system, wean it off its oil dependency, deal with China and emerging economies, the threat of terrorism and try and do something about climate change. President Obama will have to address each issue without allowing it to divert attention from the next. How is he going to manage all this? And what lessons can he draw from management thinkers?

The Brookings Institution in Washington DC last week came out with a fascinating piece, published in the Financial Times, which basically states that Obama will have to be a multi-tasker. He will have to deal with what some management consultants call the "tyranny of the urgent", where one consuming and important task siphons all your energy away from other stuff that requires attention.

Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbot says it needs a whole new way of working, one that acknowledges that everything is interconnected in a global economy. You can't just tackle one and ignore the others, otherwise the whole thing collapses and we will be right on the precipice. Talbot suggests using initiatives set down in one area to build in another.

But that means Obama will have to be a complete multi-tasker, attending to everything at once.

"Hence an overarching challenge for the next president will be a high order of multitasking," Talbot writes. "That will mean minimising the extent to which these tasks - each in its own way urgent - compete with one another. The only way to do that is to find ways of making progress on one front in a manner that helps on others. That can be done if the solutions are executed in ways that take account, and make a virtue, of the inter-relationship of the problems."

For example, bringing in new regulations for financial transactions, financial instruments, and credit flows could blaze the trail with innovative changes and political will that could then be modified, and adapted to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, rescue the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and negotiate a successful round of trade talks. Failing to do that, Talbot says, would be disastrous.

"In fact, an effective international financial system is a precondition for the revival of a trading system that will enable the world to deal with more extensive carbon trading. Moreover, since humanity must ultimately reduce carbon emissions rather than just trade in them, it is going to have to rely heavily on nuclear-generated power. That will provide a further incentive to strengthen non-proliferation measures.

"The ominous converse of these linkages is also true. Since the international system depends on the free, reliable and orderly flow of financial resources, failure to solve the current mess will stymie progress in those other areas - trade, climate and proliferation. The whole system would face both paralysis and chaos.

"By the same token, if, in our effort to mitigate global warming, we proliferate nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes but fail to institute the proper safeguards on material that can be used to make bombs, we could trigger a free-for-all competition over nuclear weaponry and risk a chain reaction of nuclear wars. Finally, if we are unable to curb global warming, it will not matter over the long run whether we are brilliant in fixing other parts of the human enterprise that are broken."

The fascinating part is that the management challenges facing Obama are not completely dissimilar to those confronting managers today where everything is in upheaval and interconnected, change is constant, unpredictability rules.

What is the best way to deal with problems when everything is coming at once? How many managers do you see do that? And what kind of manager should Obama be? What are his most important priorities?

What are the big future job trends? What will the workplace look like in 10 years time?

Generally, this has always been an area for all sorts of prognostications and some weird forecasts and it's always interesting to look ahead. So what can we expect?

There have been predictions of more temp and casual workers, more telecommuting, more restructuring and greater job flexibility and the World Future Society has some fascinating research into what might lie ahead and how the workplace will look beyond 2009.

According to the researchers, everything you will do or say will be recorded by 2030. Within the next 10 years, humans will have nanoimplants ensuring that everyone is locked into the system and everyone will have a unique IP address. What's even more alarming is that all conversations will be recoverable. So nothing will fade away.

The WFS also warns that we can expect more bio-violence and attacks using bacteria and viruses that are altered in a way that makes them more lethal.

Another prediction is that the car's domination of our roads appears to be coming to an end as wireless systems become more powerful.

An interesting one is that careers will become more specialised. So instead of having people coming out of universities with, for example, degrees in business, you will have niche majors in such areas as sustainability, strategic intelligence, nanotechnology, computer and digital forensics and comic book art.

There is also a warning that professional knowledge will become as obsolete as quickly as it's acquired which means most professions will need continuous retraining and instruction.

And there is a forecast that 60% of the world's population will be living in cities by 2030, creating enormous issues of crowding, infrastructure and potential epidemics.

One of the most interesting trends is the prospect of the boomers bowing out and retiring. Global KPMG research suggests we will have a problem from about 2010 when the boomers start leaving the workforce at a faster rate than Generation Y are entering. KPMG demographer Bernard Salt says the numbers will exacerbate Australia's chronic skills shortages and have a massive impact on industries such as construction and financial services. Salt says net growth in the number of people entering the 15 to 64 year age group, the productive age group, transitions in Australia from 200,000 a year in the back half of the twentieth century to less than 100,000 by 2012, scaling down to 50,000 by 2025.

But the skills shortage, combined with people's super savings being reduced in the global meltdown, means that boomers won't be retiring. Indeed, it spells the end of retirement. You can read more about it in a piece I wrote here.

Last year I did a blog entry looking at other possible scenarios including a bigger divide between the haves and have-nots; companies managing university education; hybrid cars outnumbering petrol-powered cars; more companies providing staff with transport options between work and home to minimise the need for car use and even relocating parts of their operations out of the city to where most of their workers are based.

So how do you see the workplace of the future? What will it look like? What are the big trends that you see emerging ?

It's often said that losing armies go into battle fighting the last war. The same might be said about the kind of responses we are seeing from businesses to imploding markets and the prospect of a global economic recession.

The global downturn has produced all the predictable responses from businesses, the kind of stuff they have done with every downturn. Everywhere you look, companies are slashing and burning, cutting their budgets, sacking people and winding back their portfolios. But this downturn is no ordinary implosion and might require a very different response. Not only from business, but from ordinary people caught up in the frenzy.

For a start, businesses can still make money in this downturn. It's something that I look at here.

Which helps explain why the traditional tactics of cost-cutting are doomed to fail, warns Businessweek. "The tactics of recession-as-usual are neither necessary nor sufficient for firms to weather the global economic superstorm--because it's no ordinary squall, but a once-in-a-lifetime gale ripping up the very foundations of the global economic order." The piece says companies need to address the crisis in four ways:

"First, business is a lot more global than it was 15 years ago. Globalization means there's nowhere to hide because competition is everywhere. However, at the same time globalization provides more opportunities. Some companies will adjust to the downturn by shifting their energies and resources to locations where growth remains stronger. Second, previous rounds of cost-cutting mean that organizations have less operational fat to trim to maintain their profitability. And customer expectations of service and quality remain high, meaning that organizations should not compromise these in a rush for savings. Third, the way in which many companies now do business is different. Organizations have defined their core business ever more tightly and are thus heavily dependent on complex networks to supply essential goods and services. This increases their exposure to risk in a downturn. And finally, the increased role of debt in our economy is going to have a particular impact in this downturn--much more than before. The financial engineering that looked so attractive in the good times is going to take its toll in the bad.

In other words, strategies built around cost-cutting are doomed to fail.

The head of Britain's association for management consultants, Alan Leaman, has come up with his guide for what he calls "downturn virgins", senior managers in business and in the public sector who have never before experienced an economic crisis. He says companies need to show some leadership, invest in planning, rethink their strategy to fit in with the changed economic environment, focus on what's important, seize the opportunities when they come up (and they will because no-one should ever waste a good crisis), look after their customers, find ways of improving productivity without cutting jobs, looking after your suppliers and employees and not expecting the government to solve your problems.

But how should individual employees deal with it? The first thing I would suggest is to start planning. Start developing your networks, make sure your resume is up to date and start thinking about where else you could work.

Others suggest changing your approach at work: keep busy, be ready to adapt and change, learn new skills and probably most importantly, don't elt what's happening at work affect your personal relationships and life outside the workplace.

How has your company responded to the downturn? Are they doing it right, or are they going about it the wrong way? And has it affected your life? What have you done to adapt?

In the wash-up last week's Government plans to fight climate change, focus will start to shift on the prospect of green jobs. It has been touted as a potential bonanza that will save the economy and the planet.

This is an area of enormous potential. But it raises a number of key questions. Still, it's an exciting area worth exploring

The ACTU and Australian Conservation Foundation put out a good report Green Gold Rush which lays out the possibilities. Based on an analysis of 30 key industries, the report concludes that Australian is very well placed to develop hundreds of thousands of green jobs by 2030. Areas that would generate lots of work, and money, include renewable energy, energy efficiency,
sustainable water systems, biomaterials which include biodegradable packaging and
plastics, bio-based chemicals, metallurgical and fossil fuel product substitutes, green buildings, waste and recycling.

"With the right policy settings, six market sectors currently valued at $US15.5 billion and employing 112,000 people could grow by 2030 to a value of $243 billion and 847,000 jobs."

Forbes has come up with its own list of what it calls "six figure green jobs" which include chief sustainability officers, climatologists, renewable energy managers, and conservation scientists.

One of the jobs that I have talked about a lot is that of the chief carbon officer. This person will not only have to be across environmental issues. They will also have to be experts in accounting, legal, insurance, risk and tax. The question is whether businesses are ready to create that sort of role. I look at how the chief carbon officer will be the hot job of the future in my piece here.

But what are the prospects of creating green jobs when the world's markets are in turmoil and we are facing a global recession? It is an interesting point but the climate crisis is actually making the losses from the financial crisis look like small change, according to a European Union-commissioned report headed by a Deutsche Bank economist which you can read about here.

Study leader study leader Pavan Sukhdev told the BCC: ""It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year. "It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year. So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."

In the US, they are talking about green jobs rebuilding the economy, boosting employment and creating industries that do not exist at the moment. More from CFO.com.

Still, markets do recover, and this one will in time. Creating a green economy and job market will have an impact for future generations.

The creation of green jobs is exciting stuff but my big concern is whether we actually have enough skills in Australia to create them. It is an issue I look at in my piece here.

So what are the chances of creating a green job market? What are the green jobs of the future? Do you this market will take off?